Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  Enough, she tells herself – but it turns out these commands don’t clear the smoke from her brain. Beverly uncorks a second bottle of wine. She cracks open her window, lights a cigarette pinched from Ed. Smoke exits her lips in a loose curl, joining the snow. She wonders if this will become a new habit, too.

  Nobody blames massage therapy for the young soldier’s suicide exactly, but Representative Wolly’s H.R. 1722 programme gets scuttled, and plenty of the commentators add a rueful line about how the young lance corporal had been receiving state-funded deep-tissue massages at a place called Dedos Magicos.

  At Dedos, it’s surprising to see how much everyone is affected, even those on staff who only briefly met Ilana. There are lines of mourning on Ed’s face. He spends the week following Eric’s death walking softly around the halls of the parlour in black socks, hugging his arms around his ice-cream scoop of a belly. He doesn’t curse or scream at anybody, not even the clock face. A gentle hum seems to be coming from deep in his throat.

  And where is Derek? His phone is still disconnected. She tries another number listed on one of his intake forms, and discovers that he’s been AWOL from his regular groups at the VA hospital. The counsellor there reports that she hasn’t heard a peep from him in five or six days. Beverly replays her last words to him until she feels sick. She keeps waiting for him to show up, staring down at the Dedos parking lot. It occurs to her that this vigil might merely be the foretaste of an interminable limbo, if Derek never comes back.

  Outside the window, geese with sunshine pooling on their wings like wet paint are flying westward. Beverly has been noticing many such flocks moving at fast speeds over Esau, and whenever she sees them they are as gracefully spaced as writing. She can’t read any sense behind their dissolving bodies. Then the red parchment of the Wisconsin sunset melts, black space erases the geese, it’s night.

  Early Sunday morning, the phone startles Beverly awake.

  This time, thank God, it’s not Ed Morales. It’s not Janet calling with the weather report from Sulko, Nevada, or the joyful percolations of her twin nieces, wearing their matching jammies under Gemini stars in the American desert. Nobody else calls her at home. No stranger has ever rung her at this hour.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Bev. Sorry to call so early.’

  ‘Derek.’

  Beverly sinks under her coverlet. The relief that washes through her leaves her feeling boneless, jellied.

  ‘Were you up? You sound wide awake.’

  ‘You scared me. The last time I saw you –’

  ‘I know. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you like that. I honestly don’t know why that happened. It’s weird because I’ve been feeling so much better lately. And for that I wanted to say, you know: thank you. To be honest, I was never expecting much from you. My real doctor at the VA made me enrol in the programme. Massage therapy, no offence, I was thinking: hookers. Happy endings, la-la beads.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But whatever you do back there works. I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. I sleep through the night.’

  The wall clock says 3 a.m.

  ‘I sleep good,’ he maintains, as if wanting to forestall an argument. ‘Tonight is an exception to the rule, I guess.’ He laughs quietly, and Beverly feels like a spider clinging to one bouncing line – their connection seems that frail.

  ‘Well, we’re both awake now.’ She swallows. ‘Why are you calling me here, Derek?’

  ‘I’m not cured, though.’

  ‘Well, Derek, of course you’re not,’ she says, fighting to get control of a lungeing pressure in her chest. ‘Massage doesn’t “cure” people, it’s a process . . .’

  ‘Beverly . . .’ His voice breaks into a whimper. ‘Something’s wrong –’

  There are a few beats of silence. In the mysterious, unreal distances of her inner ear, Pfc Arlo Mackey continues screaming and screaming inside the burning truck.

  ‘I’m in pain, a lot of pain. I need to see you again. As soon as I can.’

  ‘I’ll see you on Monday, Derek. Ten o’clock.’

  ‘No, Beverly. Now.’ And then there is shuffling on his end of the receiver, and an awful sound like half a laugh. ‘Please?’

  Ed Morales has never fired anybody in his thirty-year tenure as the owner of Dedos Magicos, and he always mentions this a little wistfully, as if it’s a macho experience he’s always dreamed of having, the way some men want to summit Everest or bag a lion on safari. She doesn’t doubt that he will fire her if he finds them out.

  Still, where else are they supposed to go? Beverly is a professional. She is not going to confuse everything even further at this late hour by beginning to see patients in her home.

  Beverly has keys to the building. She drives beneath a full, icy moon, following the chowdery line of the Esau River. All the highways are empty. When she pulls into her staff slot, the sergeant’s blue jalopy is already there.

  ‘Thank you,’ he mumbles as they climb out of their cars. His eyes are red hollows.

  ‘Don’t be scared, promise? I don’t know what went wrong the other day.’

  Beverly, who has some idea, says nothing.

  ‘Are you afraid of me, Beverly?’

  ‘Afraid! Why would I be? Are you angry at me?’

  Kind nos are exchanged.

  There is the fat moon behind him, one white ear eavesdropping brazenly in the Midwestern sky.

  Beverly fumbles with the car lock, gets them both inside the building. Something is moving under his shirt, on his back, she can see it, a dark shape. In the moonlight, his snowy boots look almost silver. Nothing else stirs in the long hallway, their shoes mewl on the tiles, sucked along by slush. They speak at the same time.

  ‘Lie down?’

  ‘I’ll go lie down –’

  ‘Thank you for meeting me, Beverly,’ he says again, sounding so much like a boy about to cry. ‘Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong.’ He groans. ‘Ah, Bev! Something feels twisted around . . .’

  He pulls off his shirt, lies down. Beverly sucks in her breath – his back is in terrible shape. The skin over his spine looks raw and abraded; deep blue and yellowish bruises darken the sky of Fedaliyah. And a long bright welt, much thicker and nastier than the thin scar she erased, stretches diagonally from his hip bone to his shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, Derek! Did someone do this to you? Did you do this to yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you have some kind of accident?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says flatly. ‘I don’t remember. It looked this way when I woke up two days ago. It’s gotten worse.’

  Beverly touches his shoulder and they both wince. Maybe the welt did erupt from inside the tattoo. Maybe Derek vandalized the tattoo himself, and he’s too ashamed or too frightened to tell her. She’s surprised to discover how little the explanation matters to her. In the end, every possibility she can imagine arises from the same place – a spark drifting out of his past and catching, turning into this somatic conflagration. No matter how it happened, she is terrified for him.

  She dips a Q-tip into a bottle of peroxide, stirs.

  This time she abandons any pretension of getting the true story out of him. She doesn’t try to grab hold of April 14 and reset it like a broken bone. She doesn’t mention IEDs or Mackey. Her concerns about whether or not it would be better for the sergeant to forget the wire, wipe his slate clean, are gone; she thinks those debates must belong to a room without this boy hurting in it. All she wants to do right now is reduce his pain. If she can help him with that, she thinks, it will be miracle enough.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘We’re going to fix you up. Hold still for me, Derek.’

  She begins at the base of his spine, rolling up, avoiding the most aggravated areas. He only whimpers once. Through his neck, she can feel the strain of his gritted teeth.

  ‘That fucking kills, Beverly – what are you doing?’


  ‘Shh – you focus on relaxing. This is helping.’

  She defaults to what she knows. Eventually, like in the first sessions, she can feel something shifting under her hands. Her voice needles in and out of Zeiger’s ears as she tells him where to move and bend and breathe. It’s dark in the room, and she’s barely looking at his back, letting his fascia and muscles guide her fingers. Gradually, and then with the speed of wind-blown sands, the story of the tattoo begins to change.

  A little after 5 a.m., Beverly stops the massage to button her sweater up to her neck. It’s the same baggy, cerulean skin that she always puts on, her old-lady costume. Tonight her sleeves bunch at her elbows, so that she feels like a strange moulting bird – eating has kept slipping her mind. The moon is out; their two cars, viewed through the parlour window, have acquired a sort of doomed, mastodon glamour, shaggy with snow. A green light blinks ceaselessly above them, some after-hours alarm she’s never here to see. She checks to make sure the windows are closed – the room feels ice cold. Beverly moves to get Zeiger’s shirt, towels. She’s washed and dressed the damaged skin; the tattoo is almost completely hidden under gauze. Now she doesn’t have to look at the red star. Beverly cotton-daubs more peroxide onto his neck, which has relaxed. Zeiger begins to talk. With his eyes still shut, he tours her through the landscape on his back; it’s a version of April 14 that is completely different from any that’s come before. She listens to this and she doesn’t breathe a word. She has no desire to lift the gauze, check the tattoo against this new account.

  When he’s finished, Beverly asks him in a shaky voice: ‘Nobody died that day, Derek?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  He sits up. Perched on the table’s edge, with the blanket floating in a loose bunting around his shoulders, the sergeant flexes and relaxes his long, bare toes.

  ‘Nobody died, Bev. That’s why I got the tattoo – it was a miracle day. Amazing fucking grace, you know? Fifty pounds of explosives detonate, and we all make it back to the FOB alive.’

  Beverly smoothes a wrinkle in a square of gauze, tracing the path of what was, the last time she checked, the Diyala River.

  ‘Nobody died. I lost a chunk of my hearing, but I just listen harder now.’

  His face is beaming. ‘I love telling that story. You’re looking at the proof of a miracle. My tattoo, it should hang in a church.’

  Then he slides towards her and cups one big hand behind her head. He sinks his fingers through the grey roots of her hair and holds her face there. It’s a strange gesture, more gruff than romantic, his little unconscious parody of how she feels towards him, maybe – it makes her think, of all things, of a mother bear cuffing its cub. He digs his fingers into her left cheek.

  ‘Thank you, Beverly.’ Zeiger talks in a telephone whisper, as if their connection is about to be cut off at any moment by some maniacal, monitoring operator. ‘You can’t even imagine what you’ve done for me here . . .’

  For what is certainly too long an interval Beverly lets her head rest against his neck.

  ‘Oh, you’re very welcome,’ she says into a muzzle of skin.

  What happens next is nothing anyone could properly call a kiss; she turns into him, and his lips go slack against her mouth; when this happens, whatever tension remains in him seems to flood into her. She fights down a choking sensation and turns her head, reaches for his hand.

  ‘Beverly –’

  ‘Don’t worry. Look at that snow coming down. Time’s up.’

  CONTRIBUTORS

  * * *

  André Aciman is most recently the author of Harvard Square, which is published in 2013. He is the chair of the PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and the director of the Writers’ Institute. ‘Abingdon Square’ is taken from a forthcoming book, Moral Tales.

  John Burnside teaches at the University of St Andrews. His most recent books are Black Cat Bone, a poetry collection, and A Summer of Drowning, a novel.

  Janine di Giovanni has reported on more than a dozen wars for nearly twenty years. She is an award-winning reporter and author, and the former president of the Jury of the Prix Bayeux for war reporters. Her latest book is Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love. ‘Seven Days in Syria’ was supported by funding from The Nation Institute.

  Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: Moth Smoke, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which is published in 2013. He lives in Lahore.

  Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her new novel, All Is Song, was published in January 2012. She was recently named by The Culture Show as one of the 12 Best New British Novelists.

  Ben Marcus is the author, most recently, of The Flame Alphabet. He is the fiction editor of the American Reader.

  Darcy Padilla is a documentary photographer and lecturer living in San Francisco, California. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Fellowship and the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanitarian Photography.

  Colin Robinson is the co-founder of OR Books, and previously worked for Scribner, the New Press and Verso. He has written for a range of publications including the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Nation. He divides his time between New York, London and Liverpool.

  Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the New York Times’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2011. Her new story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is forthcoming next month. In 2007 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

  Jennifer Vanderbes is the author of three novels: Easter Island, Strangers at the Feast and the forthcoming The Secret of Pigeon Point. Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.

  Lauren Wilkinson recently received her MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, where she is teaching a creative writing course. She is finishing her first novel and will be applying to medical school in the autumn.

  Callan Wink is working on a novel and a collection of stories, forthcoming from Random House in the US and Granta Books in the UK. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

  * * *

  Visit granta.com for the online edition of Betrayal, featuring podcasts with contributors including Mohsin Hamid and André Aciman, new fiction from Andrés Neuman, memoir from James Lasdun, poetry from Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah and the announcement of two New Voices.

  * * *

  ISSUE 122: WINTER 2013 | EVENTS

  * * *

  LONDON

  BETRAYAL: A LIARS’ LEAGUE STORYTELLING SALON

  28 January, 7 p.m., Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. £7, tickets include a copy of Granta 122.

  Performing stories marked by the sharp edge of loss, love and betrayal from an unnamed dystopia to the American West, the Liars’ League, a live storytelling salon, reads new work from Granta 122 contributors Ben Marcus, Jennifer Vanderbes and Callan Wink. In the second half of the evening, a contributor to Granta’s online edition of Betrayal will join us for a reading and conversation.

  THE GRANTA ART SALON

  29 January, 7 p.m., Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ. Seats are limited. Email publicist Saskia Vogel to check availability and to reserve your place: svogel@granta.com. Free.

  Granta returns to the Hospital Club for a salon that explores the lyrical space that emerges when art and literature are in dialogue.

  THE LONDON LAUNCH

  30 January, 6.30 p.m., Foyles, 113–119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB. Free.
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br />   The latest issue of Granta explores the sting of betrayal by a loved one, our leaders and from within our own hearts. Join Granta, Samantha Harvey and other contributors for readings and conversation that mark the launch of Granta 122. A drinks reception will follow.

  NEW YORK

  TRAUMA AND RESPONSIBILITY: WOMEN WRITING ABOUT RESILIENCE

  29 January, 7 p.m., 192 Books, 192 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011. Free.

  Survivor’s guilt. Does it live on in our scars, or can we overcome it? In two powerful new stories, Karen Russell and Jennifer Vanderbes explore the lives of two women who must face trauma and the responsibility they feel towards it. Granta editor John Freeman joins these two writers to explore how we write about trauma and if it is possible to release the guilt of a survivor.

  STORYTELLING: A CONVERSATION ON TRUTH AND BETRAYAL

  30 January, 7 p.m., BookCourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Free.

  From a masseuse who secretly manipulates the scars of war with her touch to the fire that perhaps didn’t have to claim the life of a loved one to a stillborn flirtation, Jennifer Vanderbes, Karen Russell and André Aciman explore the many shapes of betrayal. Granta associate editor Patrick Ryan joins these authors for a reading and conversation about their new work in Granta and the ways in which betrayal functions in a story.